Vincente Gigante | Biography

Among twentieth-century gangsters, few combined ruthlessness with bizarre personal habits quite like Vincent "the Chin" Gigante. A former hit man who climbed to the top of the New York crime world, Gigante ran the powerful Genovese family in the 1980s and 1990s. But he also drew attention. For unlike the stereotype of grim and dapper Mafia leaders, Gigante's image bordered on the absurd. "The Oddfather," as some called him, was famous for strolling Greenwich Village in his pajamas and slippers, muttering and relieving himself. He attended court dates in a bathrobe. Whenever legal trouble beckoned, the mobster checked himself into psychiatric clinics. Was it all an act? After several efforts, federal prosecutors finally convinced a court that he had been feigning insanity for more than thirty years.

Born on March 29, 1928, Gigante, the son of a jewelry engraver father and seamstress mother, tried boxing in his twenties. He joined the Genovese family as an assassin. In 1957, an early assignment to kill the prominent mob leader Frank Costello ended in disaster. When Costello escaped, rival mobsters took revenge, and convictions of family boss Don Vito Genovese, Gigante, and twenty-three others for heroin trafficking followed.

Ever cautious afterwards, Gigante found ways to steer clear of the law. He instructed associates never to speak his name, and instead, they referred to him by stroking their chins. Another strategy may have been even more helpful. In 1966, learning that New York police were investigating him for bribery, he sought psychiatric treatment. Thus began thirty years of checking himself into asylums and clinics when prosecutors pursued him and remaining there until the coast was clear. Whether feigning illness or actually suffering from schizophrenia, Gigante managed to be declared unfit to stand trial on bribery charges in 1971. Ten years later, he sat at the top of the Genovese Family's empire of extortion, gambling, loan sharking, and drugs.

For twenty years, prosecutors tried to convict Gigante. Even as they snared other New York mobsters, he proved elusive. In 1990, indicted on racketeering charges, he checked into St. Vincent's Hospital for psychiatric testing and, again, was declared unfit to stand trial. Prosecutors tried again in 1993, this time charging him not only with racketeering but ordering eight murders of mobsters a decade earlier and conspiring to kill two others in the 1990s. For three years, the court wrangled over Gigante's psychiatric health, but then a breakthrough occurred: three mob turncoats testified that Gigante had been faking mental illness for decades.

Declared competent to stand trial at last, Gigante was defeated even though he acted incoherent at his own trial. In 1997, a New York jury acquitted him of the eight murders but convicted him on conspiracy charges to commit more recent murders. The jury also found him guilty of several counts of extortion and racketeering charges. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison, five years of supervised release, and fined $1,250,000. Some observers believed that Gigante continued to run the Genovese family from prison.